Never Mind That
by Candle Beck
Summary: Slash, Sam/Dean. Sequel to "Gone Again." Sam reacts badly to the terrible mess he's made.


Sequel to "Gone Again." You're gonna want to have read that first.

Never Mind That

By Candle Beck

Six months after waking up alone in New Lebanon, Dean sees his brother.

He's digging up a grave, as is his habit. The top layer of ground is frozen, coming up in shards and splinters, and below it's coarse, brittle. Black dirt grits on his skin, itches on the edge of his jaw where he swiped his hand without thinking. Dean hums under his breath, the same lilting bit of chorus over and over again. He's almost hysterical with exhaustion, but not paying attention to that.

Then he sets his shovel down for a moment to twist his back, crack the stiffness out of his spine, and there's Sam.

He's standing outside the iron-spiked cemetery fence, half-obscured by the Impala's long back end. He's too far away and it's too dark, no way to make out his features but Dean can tell by the set of his shoulders, the slight tip of his head, the instant of searing awareness that rips through him. Sam's name falls out of Dean on a disbelieving breath.

He scrambles out of the grave, tearing out sparse handfuls of winter grass. Terrified elation shudders through him as he clambers to his feet, his bad knee groaning with pain.

Dean sprints to the fence and stops short before flinging himself up and onto the spikes. Sam is already gone. He hasn't even left a fogged handprint on the black steel of the Impala.

Dean wraps a hand around the cold iron bar, and says into the dark, "Sam?"

Somewhere off to the east, a train's moaning whistle is his only answer.

(break)

Two nights later Dean hunches inside the last phone booth in Manhattan, so drunk he keeps forgetting to breathe. The neon signs bleed through the filthy plastic walls and Dean feels as if he's been shot into space.

He calls Sam's phone and it doesn't even ring, sending him straight to voicemail. Dean rolls his forehead on the wall, shutting his eyes against the sound of Sam's voice on the message.

"What are you doing?" Dean mumbles after the beep. His mouth feels full of glue. "Why did you do that?"

Dean pauses, his mind whirling with all the things Sam might say. Dean has been conducting both sides of their conversations for so long now, driven just slightly insane by the empty passenger seat.

"Don't do it again, Sammy," Dean says finally, and hangs up quick.

He falls out of the phone booth onto the gummed sidewalk. He feels like he's going to be sick.

(break)

Sam is in Westchester County, just outside the city of New York. He sleeps for a few hours in the equipment shed at the high school baseball field, head pillowed on chest protectors, blanketed with a blue tarp so old it's almost soft. He shakes in the unrelenting cold, dreams of tripping Dean while he runs, and wakes up when the first bell splits apart the quiet. Kids in big colorful coats and gloves are crowding into the school, and Sam keeps his head down as he hurries to his car, not wanting to see how people are looking at him.

He spends five dollars for coffee and a muffin and three hours of sitting bent over his laptop in the corner. Dean's IP address has been looking for diners in Indiana and routes to avoid the toll roads. Dean has been investigating a dusty pattern of murders from half a century ago.

Sam tells himself to stop, shut the computer, get in the car and drive south or north or any other direction. Get up and walk out and leave, just _leave_. He squeezes his fist so tight half-moon bruises are set into the palm of his hand. He swears to himself, ten more minutes and then I'll go. One more day. And then I'll go.

(break)

Later, Sam checks his voicemail.

"What are you doing?" Dean asks, his voice slurred and broken up with static.

Sam carefully steers over to the shoulder. Dean asks him, "Why did you do that?"

Sam curls forward, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. The phone is pressed to his ear, and Dean is telling him, "Don't do it again, Sammy."

Then Dean hangs up, a sharp clatter that jars Sam like a minor earthquake. Sam stays bent over, his eyes shut. There are subtle tremors stirring under his skin, and he is remembering Dean's hand on the inside of his thigh, Dean sliding his rough palm and guiding Sam's leg around his waist.

Sam whispers, "I'm sorry," and lifts his head.

(break)

The next time is outside Indianapolis.

Dean is checking out a decrepit railroad station where at least seven people have died bloody in as many decades. The little building sags, broken-shouldered, up to its knees in scraggly yellow weeds. Inside it's all graffiti and the remains of hobo fires, the pale sunlight seeping in wires through the cracks in the walls.

Dean is expecting a spirit, or maybe a particularly nasty poltergeist. The EMF reader jumps and shivers with activity. Dean is moving on autopilot, keeping his back to the wall because he has no one to watch it for him now.

He doesn't find anything. He's going to have to bait it, offer something more tempting than a battered brokenhearted hunter who isn't wholly invested in whether he lives or dies. Even malicious spirits have their standards.

Driving back into town, Dean sees Sam going in the other direction.

That dirt-colored car with the big dent in the driver's side door, and Sam behind the wheel, staring right back at him. They pass in slow motion, heads turning in perfect synchronization. Sam's mouth is open with shock. Dean's eyes are about to fall out of his head. Unthinking, he twists backwards to follow Sam's car, and rolls the Impala up onto the median with a rattling thud. Car horns explode into being all around him.

Dean is startled awake, his heart going like a piston in his chest, and he swears, wrenches his car into a sloppy U-turn over the median. He thumps onto the street and almost skids out jamming down on the gas.

Dean is going to catch him. He's going chase Sam down and cut him off with one hard yank of the Impala's wheel, drag Sam out of his crappy little car and shove him down and demand some kind of explanation, make him promise never to do it again, make him swear-

Dean slews across two lanes of traffic, jerks to a stop in the parking lot of a bail bondsman. He's breathing in great ragged bursts, his vision sparkling. Far ahead, he can just make out Sam's car weaving through the traffic, diminishing with every second. Sam is running again.

Scraping his hands over his face, Dean says too loud, "What the fuck do you want," and this time even the trains don't respond.

(break)

In a motel room that he can't afford, Dean is on his knees on the floor, his face against the wood of the dresser, half-screaming into the phone, "God_damn_ it Sam," and that's all.

(break)

It has become cold enough to kill a person, and so Sam tries to sleep in his car but it doesn't work; it never works. He keeps thinking that if he has the passenger seat taken out, maybe then his legs would fit comfortably, but the image of a car without a passenger seat bothers him intensely, so he knows he'll never actually do anything about it. At three in the morning Sam layers four sweatshirts and both his coats, gets out to go lie down on a bus stop bench. It's no better, just a more interesting view above him.

The wind picks up. Sam shivers, arms locked tight against his chest with his hands buried in half a dozen sleeves. He thinks wistfully about sheets and blankets and radiators, all the things he left behind hundreds of miles ago. Being as it's somewhat difficult to acquire new fraudulent credit cards when blindly tailing his brother across the eastern half of the country, Sam has had to make all his money over a pool table, and now his priorities have narrowed down to food and gas and his phone, everything else an unaccountable luxury.

It's not something he's doing willfully. Two weeks ago, Sam ran across Dean completely by chance (or whatever else rules the universe) back in New England, two unrelated jobs in that ghost-crowded place, and a tavern outside of town with the Impala standing like a huge black flag in the parking lot, the opposite of surrender. Sam staked it out until Dean emerged and drove off in a purr of engine and washing headlights. Sam had followed him.

Sam has been following him ever since.

He's been trying to stop, but it doesn't work.

Sam falls asleep at last on the bench and wakes up to a pissed-off bus driver telling him to move the fuck on. Sam is always getting chased out of places these days.

He huddles in the front seat of his car, breathing white as he waits for the engine to warm up enough to blow hot air, and he checks his voicemail. Dean's voice is on there, drunk and torn up, screaming at him. Sam erases it right away, spends a few minutes staring at the blue frost of morning, fighting to keep his mind a perfect blank. The day yawns before him, seemingly endless.

(break)

Dean stops for gas in the middle of the afternoon, and Sam is five cars behind him, ducking surreptitiously into the strip mall across the street. Sam can see his brother from there, through the blurred traffic, leaning on his car and squinting contemplatively at the sun. It thrills Sam to be even this close; it used to be thousands of miles separating them.

Dean is slumped with weariness, one hand pulling slowly at the tense muscles in his neck. He hardly ever sleeps, which didn't surprise Sam to learn, seeing as how he's in the exact same boat most nights. Sam wonders if Dean dreams about it too, if it's replayed in crystal technicolor every time he closes his eyes.

Sam tips his head forward to rest on the side window, slightly breathless on account of the collapsed feeling in his chest. He wants to get out of this car so badly.

Sam bites the inside of his lip until there's the brassy taste of blood in his mouth, and tells himself, stop stalking your brother. He tells himself, please please leave it alone.

Dean has fallen into a trance, and he visibly jumps when the gas pump pings to a stop. Dean is disoriented, looking around as if in search of someone, and then he ducks his head. Sam touches his fingertips to the window, wishing he could say, _over here, Dean_.

(break)

Dean knows when Sam is close. _Watch out for your brother_ is kind of their family motto. Always in the back of his mind a voice that sounds like his mother's is asking, "Where's Sam?"

So Dean always knows. He gets goosebumps when Sam is around; it used to drive him crazy, that small creeping rash running over his arms, but he learned to think of it like a sixth sense, like how his dad could always tell if somebody was lying. Put Sam within a ten-mile radius and Dean can honest to god sniff him out.

Sam is a lot closer than ten miles, right now.

Dean is in the alley behind the bar, gone out to take a leak because the single bathroom inside has been hit by an appallingly literal shitstorm, and when he emerges the hair on the back of his neck stands up and goosebumps rattle across his skin. Dean freezes. He won't look. Sam will run if he looks.

Dean keeps his head perfectly still, walks on unsteady legs to a trucker who's meditatively smoking a cigarette against the chipped stone wall. Dean bums a smoke and the sulfurous green flare of a matchlight off him, and then moves away, his head down. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Sam's car lurking on the street, in the shadow of the highway overpass. Dean swallows the sour taste in his mouth, not liking how thready his pulse has become.

It isn't fair, Dean thinks, and this is something he's thought before. Sam is the one who left, who insisted it couldn't be with such awful finality. Dean would not relive that morning waking up alone in New Lebanon for all the money in the world, and the point of such a traumatic break is that it's clean, maybe crippling in its intensity but still _clean_.

Sam has followed him across a thousand miles now, and that's nothing but dirty fucking pool.

The cigarette tastes terrible. Dean flicks it away in a shower of orange sparks, and then turns and waves at his brother, pasting a huge gruesome smile on his face. Immediately, the headlights come on and Sam peels out, tires screeching behind him.

Dean watches as Sam hurries onto the highway ramp, hears his crappy engine struggling up the incline and then gunning in relief. Dean says quietly, "Keep going," but his fingers are crossed because he doesn't really mean it.

(break)

In Davenport, Dean buys a small bottle of cheap whiskey and goes to drink it inside a sleeping bag in the back of his car. He can see a skewed dark reflection of the world in the side mirror, the waning moon drifting across on its way up the sky. He can see his own breath, white and insubstantial, diluting immediately into the air.

He has to keep his eyes open. Across the black backs of his eyelids there is a scene playing over and over again, that night in Ohio half a year ago, Sam's hands on Dean's face, Sam pushing him onto the bed and then stripping off his shirt, long brown stretch of his body and the destroying look on Sam's face when he looked down at his brother.

Every time Dean closes his eyes, that's what he sees. It's worse than demon-crafted nightmares. Dean gets drunk so he can pass out without warning, just explode midair instead of this gut-wrenching tailspin. He spends all his time wishing he'd never touched Sam, never seen him or heard him or pressed an open mouth to Sam's once-broken collarbone. Dean prays for head injury; he would wipe out the whole past year of his life if he could, just leave it empty and blessedly abandoned.

Sometime around two in the morning, he finds himself staggering up the street to a silver-glowing gas station with a payphone next to the Dumpsters. Dean plugs coins into the slot with thick fingers, unconsciously braced as Sam's phone rings through to the message.

Dean says in one rushing breath, "You gotta quit this, Sammy, 'cause it's not cool anymore and it never was, it's just fucked up and _mean_, just fucking cruel man, and that's not like you so quit it, just stop."

He takes in a great shuddering gulp of air. His hand is crooked against the side of the phone, fading yellowish bruises across his knuckles.

"Come back or leave," Dean says, a brittle vein edging his voice. "Otherwise you're gonna kill me and what then."

Belatedly, Dean hears himself and slams the phone down. He's faintly horrified. He was about to start begging just then, the last scraps of his dignity fraying by the second. Dean has mostly come to terms with the fact that he's desperately in love with his kid brother, but it still catches him off guard at times, how very far he's fallen in every sense.

(break)

Eight hours later and three miles away, Sam listens to his voicemail in the stacks of the local library, his hand spread out across a row of books for strength.

Dean's voice breaks and grows ragged at the edges. He breathes heavily, as if in pain, and Sam closes his eyes because it makes it somehow easier to hear Dean reduced to this. Six months ago Sam asked his brother to fuck him, and now Dean leaves pieces of his shattered heart on Sam's voicemail every few days, and Sam has to listen.

Sam erases the message. He stares sightlessly at the books under his hand and tells himself, this is what you're doing to him. This is what you've done.

(break)

Sam doesn't leave.

Sam can't leave.

(break)

Dean traces aimless scrawling routes across the backroads and minor highways of the heartland, blowing through the fallow cornfields where weeds still stand in rows like a stunted skeleton army. He's not going anywhere. He finally realized that Sam has been tracking him over the Internet, hacking into the lousy secondhand laptop Dean won in a poker game four months ago, and so Dean left the machine in a trashcan outside Omaha. Now he's just driving, going someplace that even he doesn't know about yet.

He's trying to lose Sam. He's not thinking about what he'll do if he succeeds.

The only word Dean can think to describe this feeling is _haunted_. If Sam had died, and Dean had gone swiftly insane in his absence, and started seeing his brother's long-faced ghost in the shadows across the street, he would be in no worse shape than he is now.

Dean wonders if he'd be able to salt and burn Sam's bones, if it ever came to that. He has to pull over and get out of the car shortly thereafter, walking the muddy snow of the shoulder breathing deeply and trying not to throw up. He keeps telling himself, Sam's not dead. It seems like such a pitiful thing to be thankful for, and Dean hates that feeling.

Somewhere in western Nebraska, Dean finds an abandoned fire road twenty miles from the nearest town, and when he turns off his lights the world is doused in solid black ink. Dean crawls into the backseat and into his sleeping bag still wearing his coat, still cold. Outside there are more stars than he's seen in years, but Dean doesn't care about stuff like stars anymore.

He closes his eyes and Sam is pulling on his shoulders, dragging him down into a kiss. Dean is in as deep as he can go, gasping open-mouthed against his brother's throat. Sam is like liquid beneath him, like steam.

Dean forces his eyes open again, and just like that, poof--Sam is gone.

(break)

It's Dean's own stupid fault, the thing with the trucker. He's been hustling pool all night and once he has enough to stay on the road another week, he folds the mess of bills in half and shoves it in his pocket, swaggers out of the bar in a dead-leg drunk. He doesn't even recognize the chill curl of déjà vu in his stomach.

The trucker follows him into the parking lot, the corner where Dean left the Impala so it wouldn't get dinged or scratched by some drunk idiot. Dean hears the man's footsteps quickening behind him and turns clumsily, and the trucker whacks him over the head with something hard. (It was a piece of pipe; half an inch closer to his temple and he'd be dead right now.) Dean goes down immediately, a blindly graceful collapse.

He regains consciousness in the stubborn grass and ragged snow behind the bar. His hands are bluish and he can't feel his face. His pockets have been turned out. The silver ring has been wrenched off his finger, which is now dislocated and monstrously swollen. Dean drags himself to his feet, clinging to the building, his head throbbing, feeling cracked open.

Dean makes it as far as the parking lot again, and then a dark wave crashes over him and he pitches forward, knees hitting the asphalt with twin thunks.

Over to the left, far away, Sam shouts, "Dean!"

But that can't be real.

(break)

Sam finds the Impala in the bar parking lot two hours after last call.

He's been in the area for the better part of a day, driving around without direction, describing his brother at gas stations and diners and saying over and over again, "You'd remember him if you saw him." Dean got wise to the trace Sam put on his computer activity a week ago, and since then Sam has been obliged to resort to more old-fashioned methods. He hasn't seen his brother in days and days.

Just one more time, Sam tells himself. There is something scratching ceaselessly at the walls of his heart. He tells himself, see him once more and then get gone.

The Impala appears in the middle of a long stretch of nothing like a mirage, a vision, just as it did to start this purposeless quest. Sam turns into the parking lot in a trance, the bar shuttered and unlit and half-eaten by scrub brush. His brother's car shines blackly in the corner, and Dean must be asleep in the backseat. Sam swears, one look, just one.

Sam approaches the Impala as if it's rigged to explode, peers in with his breath caught in his chest, but there's no one there. Sam stares dumbly at the empty seats, feeling cheated in some absurd.

Then someone is coughing and moaning faintly, stumbling out from around the back of the bar, and Sam looks up in time to see Dean's legs give out from under him. Sam shouts his name without thought, and watches in distant horror as Dean slams down onto the asphalt. Dean doesn't even get his hands up to break his fall.

The next thing Sam remembers is skidding to his knees beside Dean's body, shredding his jeans and scraping off the first several layers of skin. Sam presses his hands to his brother's chest, his throat and his cheek, the peaceful set of his closed eyes. There is a huge misshapen lump on the side of Dean's head. Sam rests his forehead against Dean's for the longest moment, both hands curled in Dean's shirt.

He drags Dean back to the Impala. His knees are ruined and every step is torture.

(break)

Sam uses a chunk of his emergency cash to get a room, and hopes that no one spotted him hauling in his brother's unconscious body. Sam lays Dean out on the only bed, relocates his finger with a quick tug that has Dean groaning from the deep of his unconsciousness. He checks Dean's pulse, and then folds, pressing his ear to his brother's chest and breathing out shakily. Dean's heart is beating steadily, which is more than can be said for Sam himself.

Sam wrenches away. He piles blankets on Dean because the sharp parts of Dean's face are still ashy-gray from the cold, his lips a badly faded color. Sam retrieves the bottle of whiskey that Dean keeps under the shotgun seat of the Impala and mixes weak drinks with cloudy tap water. Sam paces the short length of the room with the flimsy plastic cup in his hand, eyes locked on Dean.

Nothing has changed at all, Sam realizes bitterly. Sam has spent almost a decade of his life trying to shake free of the debilitating hold his brother has over him, and for all the progress he's made he might as well be sixteen still. Put Dean in the same room as him and Sam can't think about anything else. He loses his breath, his chest crushed in a merciless grip. Dean is the same thing as drowning to Sam.

The liquor sands the edges off, and Sam becomes very tired. He climbs onto the bed beside Dean, lying close but not touching. Sam is shaking ever so faintly; he hasn't been this near to his brother in half a year. He can smell Dean, watch the color returning to his face. Sam stares, rapt.

Dean is battered, half-frozen, and unconscious, and still, he just wrecks Sam.

(break)

Dean dreams of Idaho again.

Their Airstream trailer shines like a new dime in the wicked summer light, surrounded by a ring of writhing flames. Sam runs in and out of the fire, laughing. Dean is chasing him, but where Sam can dart in and emerge unscathed, Dean is blistered and burned. Sam is calling to him, "Come on, Dean, hurry," and Dean sheds skin as he reaches out for his brother.

Dean wakes up. He's sweating, his arms tingling with phantom scars, and his head, which has a bag of ice precariously draped over it, hurts so badly he might have to throw up in a second. He groans, shoving off the ice pack and the top three blankets. He rolls slightly onto his side, curling up.

"Dean?"

Dean goes still. The bed shifts as Sam removes himself from it, and Dean realizes with terrifying clarity that Sam has been watching him sleep. There is air in Dean's lungs but he can't get to it. He keeps his eyes shut, his hands fisted and pressed under his chin.

"Dean, are you--don't go back to sleep, hey."

This is the worst possible situation, Dean thinks, and it might not be literal but it still feels true. He's muddled and beaten, beset with shock, this tremendous pain in his head, this unrelenting weariness in his much-abused body, and of course Sam is here to see it. God is going to hit Dean with everything He's got tonight.

Dean tells himself, don't open your eyes. He'll go away if you don't open your eyes.

(break)

Sam leaves the room to get more ice to put on Dean's head. He can tell Dean is still awake despite his on-going game of possum. Dean's back is held tensely, his fingers curling intently in the sheets. The ice seems to melt faster the harder Dean is thinking, and Sam would almost be amused by the image, Dean's frying brains, but he's really very tired.

He stands over Dean, staring unabashedly at Dean's face because he has no clue how much longer it will be available to him. Sam's throat starts to close up. He thinks suddenly and with violent force, so what if you drown? He thinks, who the fuck are you saving this life for if not him?

It frightens him very badly. He sets the ice pack on Dean's head gingerly, sees the muscle in Dean's jaw twitch. Sam pulls up a chair alongside the bed, sits with his legs splayed because his road-rashed knees are too sore to bend. He rubs a hand over his face and studies his brother.

Dean can tangibly feel it when Sam is looking directly at him. His forehead creases, his mouth tightening slightly. Sam pushes his knuckles against his cheek, shaking again. He drinks in the sight of Dean and his head gets dizzy and light.

"Stop it, Sam," Dean says roughly. Sam flinches, a ridiculous flush heating his face.

"What?"

"Staring."

Sam wrings his fingers together between his knees, leaning forward towards the bed. Dean's eyes are still stubbornly shut, and Sam wants to touch his eyelids, the weirdest little urge. Sam doesn't look away. It's like Dean is the single lit object in the world.

A deep sigh shudders out of Sam, remarkable only for the abject longing that runs through it. Not bothering to obscure the frayed edge of desire in his voice, Sam tells his brother:

"You're the only thing I want to look at."

Dean pulls the covers over his head immediately. Sam sighs again, more irritated this time and at least that's familiar territory.

(break)

Dean stays under the covers until he starts to run out of air. His T-shirt (Sam must have stripped him of his outer layers, and the idea of it makes Dean's skin feel too tight) is sweat-stuck to his back.

He feels lower than dirt, a coward and somehow also a traitor, and for the life of him he can't figure out how he's going to get out of this room without looking at Sam. The futility overcomes him at once, and he kicks the blanket off, pushes himself up sitting because it's a better defensive position than lying down. Dean's head spins, his equilibrium yawing dangerously.

Sam says, "Careful, c'mon," and Dean answers sharply, "Don't," even though Sam hasn't tried anything, barely even started reaching for him.

Dean waits until his mind clears before risking a look at his brother. Sam is bent towards him, every angle of his body directed at Dean. His eyes are brighter than normal, avid and single-minded. Sam is memorizing every centimeter of him, and Dean feels it like losing a pint of blood, weak from the drain.

Dean drops his head into his hands, blaming the concussion. He can't help feeling like this.

"Who hit you?" Sam asks.

"Nobody," Dean answers. His face contorts for a second. "Fucking asshole trucker who came at me from behind."

Sam nods, but his eyebrows are tipped up, surprise and vague disappointment that Dean doesn't need to see right now. He knows he fucked up; he knows every goddamn time.

"Lucky I was there," Sam says, forcibly cool.

Dean shoots him a glare. "Yeah, about that-"

"No, um," Sam says fast, cutting him off. "Let's not talk about it yet, okay?"

"Oh, what, you can tail me for a month but I can't even ask what the fuck? That's real fair."

"You _know_ why," Sam says, hot and plainly without thinking. He stops, visibly reins himself in. "Look. It's hard for me."

Dean stares at him in disbelief. "Yes, Sam, it's hard for me too. Especially since you started _showing up all the fucking time._"

Sam winces, and Dean experiences a brief dark satisfaction at that. Sam looks away, his throat moving as he swallows. Dean gazes at him somewhat helplessly, struck by the fierce set of Sam's mouth, the despairing angle of his head. Sam's hair has grown too long and it curls against his neck. HIs big hands are closed on his wrecked knees, knuckles pale from the grip. It is infuriating beyond measure to find that in spite of everything, what Dean most wants to do right now is sleep with his brother again.

He needs to get out of this goddamn room.

(break)

Dean starts to get to his feet and Sam's stomach seizes, thinking Dean is going to leave. It would be the smart thing to do, make his escape before things get too bad, and Sam almost wants to laugh because how the fuck can things get _worse_.

"Where are you going?"

Dean's eyes flash at him, his lip curled in a sneer. "To take a piss, is that okay with you?"

Sam waves his hand, flushing and looking down. Dean shuffles into the bathroom and shuts the door behind. Sam listens to the lock clicking, and stares at his hands, feeling small and hateful.

Sam tells himself, you're killing him. And he tells himself, leave.

He thinks about what it's like out there, white winter sky and bald land, the highways and towns and people all the same. Sam thinks about his crummy car and motel rooms with only one bed, living out of gas stations and vending machines and going days without speaking more than ten words out loud. Wretched gypsy life, shabby and lonely and worn down to the bone with no one to tell him, you look like hell, man.

Sam is trembling subtly, a bleak cold feeling spreading in his chest. He knows that he would survive; at a base level he and Dean are both fundamentally the surviving type, and suddenly that seems like more a curse than anything else, a prison sentence.

In the back of Sam's mind, the deathless voice that he never listens to is saying, this is hell. This is hell and you can't leave him here.

(break)

Dean is leaning heavily on the bathroom sink, his forehead against the smudgy mirror. He's breathing deliberately, fog growing and receding on the glass, over and over again.

Once again, Dean is thinking, not fair, not fair. He can feel his brother through the wall, the dozen feet that separate them. Dean wants to touch him so badly his hands ache, his mind lost in a torrential rain of memory and sick desire. It's all-consuming, and he tells Sam silently, you were supposed to stay gone.

The thing Dean hates most is cowering, and so he scrubs his face with cold water and steels himself, goes back out into the room. Sam is exactly where Dean left him, sitting in the chair by the bed with his jeans ripped to shit and his knees bloody. Sam pushes himself up a bit, looking at Dean with a skittish expression.

Dean pulls his eyes away, focuses on the bedside lamp, which happens to be shaped like a cornstalk. He says quickly, "You can't follow me anymore."

Sam makes a small hitching sound, something ashamed in it. "I know."

"I, I get it, why you'd want to, because I mean--obviously," Dean stutters to a stop, frustrated. Sam is watching him intently, his eyes gone a dangerous shade. "But this is how it's gotta be, right? You're the one who--you left, and that. That's already bad enough, and now it's just, you're twisting the fucking knife, Sam."

Sam's face draws, pained. His hands are linked together, fingers hard and taut.

"I know," he says again, quieter. "I've been trying to stop."

Dean makes a sound not at all like a laugh. "Any luck with that?" He rubs his eyes, sits down on the bed in exhaustion. He touches the lump on the side of his head, wincing and baring his teeth for a second.

"Dean," Sam says in an impossible kinda voice. "What if I took it back?"

And at that moment Dean's whole being freezes, and his mind becomes a perfect blank.

(break)

Sam is holding his breath. Dean is silent, eyes huge and focused far away, taken by shock. The space between them stretches out. Sam becomes lightheaded and begins to panic slightly because Dean is going to say no; Sam has fucked him up enough for one lifetime and this time it's going to be Dean who leaves. Sam curses himself, his useless goddamn heart.

Dean's gaze sharpens, a mask dropping over his features. He fixes something like a glare on his face but it hangs loose, precarious.

"That's an awful lot of shit to take back, Sammy."

Unexpectedly, Sam shivers to hear Dean call him that again. Dean's eyes widen as he notices it, and then they both quickly look away. Sam clears his throat, feeling choked. He speaks haltingly, trying to get the words right.

"Everything I told you is true. I mean, it's still true. But I just. It feels like one of us has died and I don't even know which. And I don't really care anymore how deep it goes or how bad it could get, because this. You're right. This is bad enough."

Sam pauses, forces himself to breathe slow and even. He tells Dean, "I can't stand not seeing you. Dean. Please."

Sam's voice has broken. His hands are folded together, prayerful. Dean is staring back at him, cracks starting to show as his mouth works and his eyes blink fast.

"Don't," Dean whispers. Sam shakes his head, reaches out for his brother. Dean shrinks back, hissing, and Sam jerks his hand away, mortified.

"I'm sorry," Sam says hoarsely. "You have no idea how sorry I am."

A ghastly look of disfigured amusement passes over Dean's face. "I have some idea."

Sam presses his lips together, hates himself for a moment, and then tells Dean, "It's killing you, right? It's killing me. No matter what you do, right? No matter how far apart, or how close. I think it's gonna kill us either way, so let's just. Let's at least be in the same place until that happens."

Sam stops, his heart rabbiting, knees throbbing in time. There's this cut-loose feeling in him, this sense of having leapt off a cliff. He studies Dean, who has gone pale and silent again, and Sam thinks that he would give just about everything he has to know what his brother is thinking right now.

(break)

Dean is thinking that he must be asleep, or possibly hallucinating. He touches briefly on his concussion, and the several days and weeks and months of sleeplessness that preceded it, and he knows that none of this can be real.

He's probably still lying behind that bar, insensible and gradually freezing to death. This is probably just the last hopeless fantasy that his flickering synapses can manage, a final dream of heaven before he plummets down. Dean closes his eyes, his whole body thrumming with maddening tension.

Sam says his name. Dean's eyes snap open as if on command, and he latches on to Sam's gaze immediately, that wicked energy crackling between them again. Sam sucks in a small breath, his face thin with pleading.

"You can't say stuff like that," Dean says, but he's breathless.

Sam pulls his lower lip between his teeth. "Kinda just did."

"Sam-"

"No," and suddenly Sam's hand is on his knee. Dean starts, grips the covers too tight. Sam is lit, all at once fierce. "You gotta say yes, man. This has been the worst year of my life, and I never thought I'd say that again. I've been saying it forever."

Dean wrenches his hand in the sheets, saying raggedly, "You left."

"I didn't," and Sam sounds about thirteen years old, near tears. "I tried, but I couldn't. I can't."

Dean can only blink at him for a long moment, stilled and riddled with disbelief. He is intensely focused on Sam's hand on his leg, long warm fingers pressing through denim. Sam is staring at him, begging him, and Dean keeps thinking in a mindless panic, this is everything I want.

"Everywhere I go I end up looking for you," Sam tells him. "No place is safe. You have to take me back."

An alien certainty has rooted in Sam, making his eyes blaze. He's presented this crooked dream of the world to Dean and suddenly it's always been a foregone conclusion, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Dean answers, "Yeah. Yes," and he thinks, of course.

(break)

It happens to both of them at the same time.

Sam tightens his grip just as Dean wraps his hand around Sam's elbow, and then Sam is pushing to his feet and canting forward fast. Dean falls back on the bed, drawing Sam to him and feeling a bolt of heat go through his body as Sam leans on his shoulder, then slides his hand up the side of Dean's neck.

Sam can only think, he's letting me, it's happening, stroking his fingers over Dean's face and throat. Sam has one knee up on the bed between Dean's legs, covering Dean's body with his shadow, and Dean's eyes are in slits, biting his lower lip and tipping his jaw into Sam's hand.

Dean murmurs, "Come on, come on," because he's waited for months and months and Sam is radiating heat, breathing unsteadily through his mouth. Dean pulls him down but Sam only laughs airlessly and presses his slick mouth to Dean's throat. Dean jerks, moans, and Sam feels it like a minor electric shock. He pulls Dean's collar out, licks the taste from the hollow of his brother's collarbone.

It's already too much. Dean is panting, twisting his fingers in Sam's hair. He arches his body into Sam's until Sam gives in with a groan, sinks down on top of him. His big hand is curled on Dean's face, and Dean gnaws at his thumb, made stupid and careless by the friction between them. Sam lifts his head to watch, open-mouthed and dumb.

"Jesus Christ, Dean," Sam breathes out.

Dean's teeth spark across the pad of his thumb, and Sam's hips grind down into his brother's automatically. Dean gasps, throws his head back, letting Sam's thumb slip out of his mouth and Sam can't do anything but kiss him then.

Dean kisses back, his tongue moving hard and fast against Sam's own. This is going to be too quick, and they both know it, shoving each other's shirts up but not off, notching together and rocking so tight and close. Dean hooks one leg around Sam's waist, wraps his arms around Sam's shoulders. He drags his mouth over Sam's earlobe and Sam shudders beautifully.

Burying his face in Dean's throat, Sam lets the flood overtake him, his hips moving rhythmically and without thought. Heat washes through him, a blinding fog, and Sam vanishes. He's lost in his brother, not even breath left between them, and Sam still doesn't care.

"Okay," Dean says, voice thick and so low in Sam's ear. Dean feels like he's breaking apart, crashing against Sam over and over again. He can't think past the wild feeling in his chest. "This until it kills us."

Sam nods, half-frantic against Dean's face, and he pulls Dean back, kissing him deeply and palming the sleek skin of his ribs. Sam mumbles into Dean's mouth, "Until it kills us," and then together, as one, they're gone.

THE END


End file.
